Design Objective

TL;DR Don't just seek out companies with beautiful products to work on—it probably won't matter anyway because there's more to it than visuals. Find companies with strong values and friendly people, that's what really matters. (4/4)

Laura Klein "Ok, how many other designers saw this and were sure those were sticky notes?" 😂

ABC News Stunning drone footage follows school of Cownose Rays swimming in crystal clear waters off the Australian coast.

Techtopia

A few people were even met with the business ends of a firearm and were taken into custody forcefully after disagreeing with police. Some actually endured the terrible experience of spending a few hours in jail—but a few either spent considerable time behind bars— once case resulting in two weeks in prison.

None of the Above

To the customer who accidentally got given a bottle of Chateau le Pin Pomerol 2001, which is £4500 on our menu, last night - hope you enjoyed your evening! To the member of staff who accidentally gave it away, chin up! One-off mistakes happen and we love you anyway 😉

Subtitles aren't just for deaf people. Lots of my hearing friends use them, too. If you're hearing and find yourself using subtitles on Netflix and TV and would quite like them at the cinema, please retweet to help normalise their presence! Big thanks

This is what FB developers will see in their local sandbox when building features for the upcoming redesign. Regardless of your stance on FB the company, this is a really powerful example of how a considered developer experience can directly impact the end user experience.

Tools of the Trade

Unlike WSL1, which used a Linux-compatible kernel, WSL2 will use a genuine open-source kernel compiled from the stable 4.19 version release of Linux at Kernel.org.

While Microsoft will be providing the Linux kernel, they will not provide any Linux binaries to go with it. Instead, users will still need to download their favorite Linux distribution from the Microsoft Store or by creating a custom distribution package.

GitHub Package Registry is fully integrated with GitHub, so you can use the same search, browsing, and management tools to find and publish packages as you do for your repositories. … And it supports familiar package management tools: JavaScript (npm), Java (Maven), Ruby (RubyGems), .NET (NuGet), and Docker images, with more to come.

Seb Lee-Delisle "Look at this gorgeous thing. I learned to program on this in 1983. The Sharp PC-1211"

I turned down Daniel Buchmueller for a job at Netflix. After a 60 minute interview I was on the fence, so I concluded that he "wasn't senior enough." He went to Amazon instead where he co-founded Amazon Prime Air (their drone delivery service) and was #2 on Fast Company's "Most Creative People" list.

At some point, we programmers are going to have to admit that we really can't judge another programmers technical abilities in a 60 min interview. We end up hiring programmers that are good at interviewing, but not necessarily good at doing the job. And we miss out on engineers like Daniel.

I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life: spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of “Downton Abbey.” There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa’s “wake word” to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal.

I used to feel that tech companies competing to market “privacy” could only result in a win for consumers. Now I’m starting to wonder if it serves the same purpose as carmakers adding an “eco” mode to your SUV.

Techtopia

These Ads Think They Know You The good news is, the data that's collected about you isn't all that accurate. The bad news is, inaccurate data is used to make decisions about you:

The accuracy of predictions made by data providers is difficult to verify. The companies release little evidence that those included in these groups actually belong there. A study from 2018 found that the gender assigned by data brokers was accurate, on average, only 42 percent of the time — that’s worse than just flipping a coin. So in the ads we bought, we expected many men would see ads aimed at women and vice versa.

Electric Sheep

Chris Harris This is such a cool effect: "First attempt at removing cars off the roads with neural nets. Will have to dream harder."

None of the Above

Kelly "I saw this on reddit and I’ve watched it a minimum of 27 times and every single time it has only gotten better and exceeded my expectations"

Daniel Silvermint 👇 No spoilers in this thread, other than you might care less about the last season, after reading this (I do). Also applies to many other TV shows (and some movies) that struggle to switch between plotter and pantser modes:

It has to do with the behind-the-scenes process of plotters vs. pantsers. If you’re not familiar with the distinction, plotters create a fairly detailed outline before they commit a single word to the page. /2

KRON4 News When your city has a chronic infrastructure problem, but also strong DIY ethos:

'Pothole Vigilantes' are hitting the streets of Oakland at night to fill potholes

Design Objective

Based on consumer insights and learnings, do you have a product strategy that defines your hypotheses about what you hope will fulfill the trifecta of delighting customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways?

Note to self: only use certificates that expire on a work day morning, early in the week. You will thank yourself later.

Locked Doors

Sindre Sorhus I had a similar issue with nodejs/security-wg. Overzealous attempts to flag expected behavior as security vulnerabilities is not helping open source security:

Many of @snyksec's vulnerability reports are bullshit. They classified all execa versions as vulnerable because it exposes childProcess.exec(). Duuh. That's kinda the point of the package. They also don't contact maintainers before publishing their reports either.

On Thursday evening, Pornhub VP Corey Price claimed in a statement to BuzzFeed News that his company is “extremely interested” in buying Tumblr and “very much looking forward to one day restoring it to its former glory with NSFW content.”

Emma Taylor 👇 Alternative title, "[How] the Allies won the war because a coder wanted his lunch sooner"

How do I know so many made-up stories about how the Enigma code was cracked and didn't know until yesterday how interesting the real story is? A volunteer at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park just casually blew my mind with a bit of the story. /1

Design Objective

Your periodic reminder that design is what ships, not what you want to ship.

nicole The hardest problem in design is knowing the limits of the medium:

it takes 1 minute for a designer to add unnecessary fanciness that costs a developer hours of time, technical debt, and can even make things less accessible by not using out of the box element features

Just interrupting truism "older people don't use technology" to remind it's often because tech DOES NOT WORK FOR THEM.
Low circulation in your fingers? Touch screen won't respond. Got a tremor? Out of luck. Low contrast designs without zoomable text? It's doable but exhausting.

Tools of the Trade

last week i got to witness an engineering department lose a full day's work because if you put an emoji in a git commit message, Atlassian Bamboo chokes on it forever and you're forced to rebase master, like you should NEVER DO. this was of course referred to as The Emojiency

somebody asked me which emoji it was, and i didn't actually know, so i had to go find out

Back when there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shilings in a pound, the IBM 1401 computer had optional hardware (i.e. transistors) to do arithmetic on pounds/shillings/pence. Of course, there were two incompatible data standards—BSI and IBM—so this knob selected the format.

Lines of Code

Among the most mind-boggling allegations in Hertz's filed complaint is that Accenture didn't incorporate a responsive design, in which webpages automatically resize to accommodate the visitor's screen size whether they are using a phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop.
...
Accenture also failed to test the software, Hertz claimed, and when it did do tests "they were seriously inadequate, to the point of being misleading." It didn't do real-world testing, we're told, and it didn’t do error handling.

Techtopia

I’m a responsible parent so I use the controls on iOS to limit screen time on the old iPhone my 9-year old uses. A white-listed exception is iMessage; he’s worked out he can send someone a YouTube vid then watch it in iMessage to circumvent the control. So proud 😅

Danny Tuppeny We're slowly approaching the point where you need DevTools and Wireshark just to keep the lights on in your house:

The smart meter in-home-device that @bulbenergy gave us seems to do 2 DNS queries every 3 seconds. The WiFi light is continually flashing like it can't connect. 🤷🏼‍♂️

the researchers not only found that cryptocurrency users have in the last few years stored their crypto treasure with hundreds of easily guessable private keys, but also uncovered what they call a "blockchain bandit." A single Ethereum account seems to have siphoned off a fortune of 45,000 ether—worth at one point more than $50 million—using those same key-guessing tricks.

None of the Above

ScienceHex I love this new meme that's going around Twitter of people as X:

Peopleware

Hillel 👇 TL;DR We have ample evidence that sleep and stress affect our productivity. Also, we know code reviews are very effective. The rest is opinion.

One of my most controversial software opinions is that your sleep quality and stress level matter far, far more than the languages you use or the practices you follow. Nothing else comes close: not type systems, not TDD, not formal methods, not ANYTHING.

Second order thinkers ask themselves the question “And then what?” This means thinking about the consequences of repeatedly eating a chocolate bar when you are hungry and using that to inform your decision. If you do this you’re more likely to eat something healthy.

Teamwork

John Cutler 👇 Sprints are about incremental delivery, iterative development, and rapid learning. Not more frequent deadlines. Thread:

The value of “sprints” is largely misunderstood / glossed over.

Sprints are meant to be a healthy (and effective) forcing function / enabling constraint ... not a way to drive teams/individuals...not a hamster wheel ... not “breaking up a project” (1/n)

“It doesn’t feel random when it happens three times in a row. It doesn’t feel random when you see that all the people around you, who don’t look like you, aren’t asked to step aside,” Knoderer said. “I don’t want to change the way my hair grows out of my head.”

It's taken me 45 trips around the sun, but for the first time in my life I know what it feels like to have a "band-aid" in my own skin tone. You can barely even spot it in the first image. For real I'm holding back tears.

"… When we looked into the steps people were going through to verify their accounts we found that in some cases people's email contacts were also unintentionally uploaded to Facebook when they created their account," the spokesperson said in a statement.

Within a few hours, the worst Tide Pod videos were scrubbed from YouTube, and the platform changed its algorithm so anyone searching for them would be shown a safety video.

“No debate, just action,” said Mr. Pritchard. A few months later, P.&G. announced that it would resume advertising on YouTube.

Sam This is creepy! But also, what other words can I yell into my phone and have free stuff delivered to my house?

I yelled into my phone “I’m pregnant” for 5 minutes on Sunday to see which apps would start advertising baby things. Definitely NOT pregnant. Zero babies in my sphere. Didn’t get any ads, but just received these free formula samples in the mail, which is creepier.

Inventor of the Dishwasher: I HAVE CREATED SOMETHING THAT WILL MAKE ALL YOUR LIVES EASIER.
Humanity: WHOA. So we just put dirty dishes in and it cleans them?
IoDW: Um, no. You need to wash them first.
H: Uh...
IoDW: Not thoroughly. Just, like, what you'd do if you were drunk.

I actually asked the doctor this week if I needed a measles booster and he replied by rote “only if you’re traveling places with outbreaks and low vaccinations rates” and then he stopped and we looked at one another awkwardly.

Klara Sjöberg "What happens with you divide by zero on a mechanical calculator."

Tools of the Trade

Up to 20% of your application dependencies may be unmaintained This number feels like it's on the low end, I venture to guess closer to 80%. But not the point. Tidelift's business model is selling maintenance contracts to businesses, and using that money to pay open source developers to maintain their codebase. Different from Gitpay. I hope both work out, and we find a sustainable model for open source development.

Web-end

"...the user agent string for the latest Dev Channel build of Microsoft Edge: "... Edg/74.1.96.24" We’ve selected the “Edg” token to avoid compatibility issues that may be caused by using the string “Edge,”..."

Lingua Scripta

Architectural

Of all the technical debt you can incur, the worst in my experience is bad names -- for database columns, variables, functions, etc. Fix those IMMEDIATELY before they metastasize all over your codebase and become extremely painful to fix later.. and they always do.

Every time that you make changes to a software system, it is essential to identify the type of maintenance that you are performing. Keeping track of it gives excellent insights into your engineering practices. For example, the percentage of time that you spend in each of the four maintenance types gives you an idea of the maturity and skill level of your software engineering organization. It can also give you an idea of the maturity level of your product and codebase.

Locked Doors

I think right around this minute is just about exactly 5 years since the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL became public. I remember the day vividly, and if you're interested, allow me to tell you about how the day, and the subsequent months, and years unfolded ...

Researchers said a simple search on Facebook for keywords like “spam,” “CVV” or more returned results for a slew of groups carrying out these illegal services. In total, the groups had approximately 385,000 members – and some had been up on Facebook for as long as eight years, researchers said.

And, of course, the algorithm:

Ironically, when researchers joined some of these groups, Facebook’s algorithm suggested that they join other groups promoting illicit activity under its “Suggested Pages” tab.

None of the Above

Nature News & Comment "Dr. Katie Bouman, who led the creation of an algorithm that helped capture the first ever image of a black hole, tells us what this breakthrough means for science 👩‍🔬 #EHTBlackHole #BlackHole"

A couple of decades ago, it was perfectly normal to smoke cigarettes inside. Today, very few would do that. I think it’s the same with cars in the city center: One day we will look back and ask ourselves why we ever thought that was a good idea.

It's fascinating to watch the language of food consumption mutate as it travels across genders. For decades, "dieting" was the domain of women. It looked like Weight Watchers, it looked like Snackwells, it looked like South Beach, but whatever it looked like, it was always portrayed as something simultaneously necessary, shameful, pride-inducing, hated and ever-present.

The term became a victim of “gender contamination,” as Amanda Mull wrote in the Atlantic — which is “when a product or idea becomes so female-coded that men are no longer willing to engage with it.”

Instead men — and the companies that cater to them — found new ways to describe food restriction. Not “weight loss” but “performance-enhancing.” Not “look great” but “perform better.”

Part of the point of writing this blog post is to raise awareness, so that even if people do still recommend storing UTC, they can add appropriate caveats rather than treating it as a universal silver bullet.

Architectural

Sahil Lavingia This is ballpark similar to our costs, and I imagine other startups as well:

The rough cost behind shipping a product like Gumroad:
Fixing a bug costs about $1,000-$5,000.
A small feature improvement costs about $2,000-$8,000.
Shipping a major feature like product ratings costs $60,000-$100,000.

So I applaud the simple code. The code that was based on a reasonable assumption, and continued working for years after that assumption was broken before it complained. And I applaud the developer that was mature enough to just write an O(MN) function cause it worked. It's #agile

Peopleware

me: it’s not that I mind freelancing, I love it. It’s just that the social interaction is pretty minimal and extremely uneven day-to-day and sometimes I wonder how that will affect me long term, you know?

From these axioms, Tononi proposes that we can identify a person’s (or an animal’s, or even a computer’s) consciousness from the level of “information integration” that is possible in the brain (or CPU). According to his theory, the more information that is shared and processed between many different components to contribute to that single experience, then the higher the level of consciousness.

…it turns out that taking a break to view some cuteness might actually benefit your work there’s a lot we’re still learning but according to some research looking at cute animals is associated with a boost and focus and fine motor skills.

Teamwork

Wrong directions? Delayed tickets? A questionnaire that requires installing the original Adobe Reader specifically? Cheap ultrabook with unfamiliar keyboard layout and poor web-based editor with no shortcuts whatsoever that lags even on a local machine? Excuse me, I am in the office of the most capable IT-company in the world, am I not?

Qasim Rashid, Esq. "If you need a reason to smile then remember that someone built a water slide for ducklings & they are totally here for it😃"

Bruno Martin 👇 Some borders are formed by nature, some borders are formed by laws:

1/ A vulture can fly up to 400 kilometres each day in search of carrion. Little should it care whether this flight takes it from one country to another. The vultures of Spain, however, skirt around the Portuguese border with uncanny accuracy.

It’s really ridiculous that we expect adult femme game devs & members of other nerd professions to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Mario, Batman, & Star Wars, but dudes are rarely criticized for not knowing the names of the Babysitter’s Club members or Barbie’s younger sisters.

When We Say 70 Percent, It Really Means 70 Percent 538 trying to explain how statistical probabilities work, what calibration is, how to judge the success of their models (*), and also stay patient with their critics. The last part, not so successfully:

If you say there’s a 29 percent chance of event X occurring when everyone else says 10 percent or 2 percent or simply never really entertains X as a possibility, your forecast should probably get credit rather than blame if the event actually happens. But let’s leave that aside for now.

(* They have been the most accurate source for predictions, if you understand the difference between "85% chance to win" and "guranteed win")

In recent years, a term has begun to circulate to capture this phenomenon — “stochastic terrorism,” in which mass communications, including social media, inspire random acts of violence that according to one description “are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” In other words, every act and actor is different, and no one knows by whom or where an act will happen — but it’s a good bet that something will.

After prefix matches, it can fall back to substring matches. Starting with substring matches would almost always be the wrong thing to do since users start typing words at the beginning not somewhere in the middle.
…

Tools of the Trade

Lucet is designed to take WebAssembly beyond the browser, and build a platform for faster, safer execution on Fastly’s edge cloud. WebAssembly is already supported by many languages including Rust, TypeScript, C, and C++, and many more have WebAssembly support in development.
…
Lucet can instantiate WebAssembly modules in under 50 microseconds, with just a few kilobytes of memory overhead. By comparison, Chromium’s V8 engine takes about 5 milliseconds, and tens of megabytes of memory overhead, to instantiate JavaScript or WebAssembly programs.

Architectural

If there’s one lesson I would like the next generation of developers to learn, it is to spend less time doing hard things and more time making hard things easy. Customers benefit from the former. Customers and peers and we ourselves benefit from the latter.

Your AirPods Will Die Soon "The surprisingly short life of new electronic devices" Mine barely hold charges, and incidentally, started failing a week before Apple announced the 2nd generation AirPods 😤

It is ludicrous to conclude that the statistically non-significant results showed “no association”, when the interval estimate included serious risk increases; it is equally absurd to claim these results were in contrast with the earlier results showing an identical observed effect.

There's no silver bullet, we need to be statistically literate:

Our call to retire statistical significance and to use confidence intervals as compatibility intervals is not a panacea. … But eradicating categorization will help to halt overconfident claims, unwarranted declarations of ‘no difference’ and absurd statements about ‘replication failure’ when the results from the original and replication studies are highly compatible.

Design Objective

But nature is the ultimate optimizer, having run an endless slate of A/B tests over billions of years at scale. And in nature, friction and inconvenience have stood the test of time. Not only do they remain in abundance, but they’ve proven themselves critical. Nature understands the power of friction while we have become blind to it.

Kyle Russell 👇 A thread for founders that don't come from an enterprise background:

Something technical founders often don't appreciate when building an enterprise tool for the first time is the extent to which companies outside of Silicon Valley/big cities generally buy technology as if they haven't only hired brilliant people

A “Bar Chart Race” animation showing the changing ranks of the 10 biggest cities in the world since 1500.

Fascinating to watch giant cities vanish after falling in conquests, and amazing that three UK cities were in the top 8 in the late 1800s.

ffsend Command line tool for using Firefox Send. Firefox Send is the easiest way to send files security, with end-to-end encryption and links that expire after a few days or downloads.

Why you shouldn't use Moment.js... A thoughtful analysis of moment.js and how it compares with date-fns, Joda, and friends. I agree with the main points: moment.js is hard to debug, the mutable API is a recipe for subtle bugs, and it's not particularly fast. It is a good choice, though, is you need some of its unique features or plugins.

To colourise black and white images, we employed a technique in deep learning known as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). This comprises:

A first neural network — a ‘generator’ — with many mathematical parameters (> 20 million) that tries to predict the colour values at different pixels in a black and white image, based on features in the image, and

A second neural network — the ‘discriminator’ — that tries to identify if the generated colours are photo-realistic compared to the original coloured image.

Microsoft has developed a way to mask out someone drawing on a physical whiteboard, allowing remote meeting members to still see the physical whiteboard when it’s in use. This works by using any regular webcam, and it will even capture the physical whiteboard and import it digitally into Microsoft Teams so remote workers can participate in meetings or the contents of the whiteboard can be archived for future use.

Apple AirPods H1 chip (SOCs) has the processing power of an iPhone 4—in each ear!

Lines of Code

Elegance Explores what it means for code to be "elegant", by looking at a few game algorithms:

The workaround is certainly not elegant. “Look for an actor in this direction, twice” is not what I wanted to express. And yet it’s not a hack, either. The code above demonstrably does the correct thing in all cases, and is suitable as a permanent solution. It occupies that nebulous third category of “complete, but not pretty”.

programmers tend to read essays until they getting to the first line they disagree with and then tweet about it, like a compiler

Architectural

Erik Wilde The "for hipsters" jab … probably true. The "enterprise-grade GraphQL management" is a thing that already exists, and one reason I'm currently looking at GraphQL. To me, GraphQL doesn't feel like ESB, more like early Rails "RESTful APIs": easy to get started, powerful if you need it to be.

GraphQL is ESB for hipsters. for now... it also is a new opportunity for companies to sell you heavyweight centralized GraphQL management. just wait for the "enterprise-grade GraphQL management" products to appear... there, i said it first!

Look at the world around you with the eyes of a designer. Aren’t there too many pictures on your living room wall? Too many objects sitting on your desk? Too many apps on your phone home screen? Take a pass at every environment you interact with throughout your day and ask yourself the question: what can I eliminate from here to open up more breathing room for my eyes and brain?

None of the Above

Me: I would like to go to sleep now
Brain: you can't
Me: why?
Brain: you haven't Done Enough
Me: done enough...what?
Brain: Enough
Me: enough what??
Brain: Enough. Just Enough. You have not Done Enough
Me: I'll do enough if you tell me enough what
Brain: You have not Done Enough

Sussman’s main strategy for convincing editors to make the changes his clients want is to cite as many tangentially related rules as possible (he is, after all, a lawyer). When that doesn’t work, though, his refusal to ever back down usually will.

He often replies to nearly every single bit of pushback with walls of text arguing his case. Trying to get through even a fraction of it is exhausting, and because Wikipedia editors are unpaid, there’s little motivation to continue dealing with Sussman’s arguments. So he usually gets his way.

Design Objective

“The product’s design was excellent, but the product was buggy, so I couldn’t recommend it.”

This is used as an excuse for why design-led orgs don’t work.

Yet, that’s the heart of issue. A truly design-led org would focus on the user’s experience. Bugs are part of that.

Paul Ford 😭 "This just happened on my home screen and quarters started spraying out of my USB jack."

Tools of the Trade

THANOS JS "Reduce the file size of your project down to 50%, by randomly deleting half of the files."

Using the iPad Pro as my development machine Using Mosh, Tmux, Docker, and other cool tricks that work around the limits of iOS, and can turn an iPad into an almost MacBook replacement. But the inevitable conclusion (also my experience):

I have decided that the iPad is the perfect mobile device for most of my work, but it can’t replace my main work devices (MacBook or iMac). I know it sounds cool to use the iPad as the main development machine, however, the constant limitations you’re hitting is just frustrating. I agree with most of the people out there that iOS is still limiting in several ways.

Peopleware

I’ve decided, from now on, to field hostile questions at conferences by first asking, as a point of clarification: “What is it you hope to get from my answer to this question?”

At the very least, it may make these interactions more interesting.

Sarah Federman The goal of the interview process is to hire future employees, so do whatever to help the candidate succeed:

Unpopular tech opinion. There is always going to be a better interview experience depending on who the candidate is and the only real solution is to just ask them which they prefer (and yes, I do believe this can scale).

Techtopia

Li Jin 👇 Future marketplaces are more than aggregators of demand and supply (but likely still contributing to the erosion of income):

In the future, marketplaces may not even feel like marketplaces to the end user. Because they connect all the dots behind the scenes--and provide such a high level of standardization and quality--people feel like they’re interacting with a high-quality, concierge-level service.

Locked Doors

The hugely influential Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, is notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft’s Windows. It’s also known for inventing the word “hacktivism” to describe human-rights-driven security work.

A major international bank accidentally published a private package of their own to the public npm Registry, took 3 years to notice, and then sent DMCA takedown notices to Amazon and Cloudflare for hosting "stolen code". Now I have to pay a lawyer to explain this to them.
...
Our lawyer is also going to need to explain to a bank why a React package does not constitute "Stolen Financial Credentials" oh lord

The week number is encoded into the data stream by a 10-bit field. A binary 10-bit word can represent a maximum of 1,024 weeks, which is approximately 19.7 years. Each 19.7 year period is known in GPS terms as an “epoch”.

At the end of each epoch the receiver resets the week number to zero and starts counting again – a new epoch begins.

if you were or are the friendly gent (blue coat) who was in the shop half an hour ago and left a big jar of bees on the table in the poetry section, please come back and reclaim your jar of bees. if you aren't, please rt until we find him #FindTheBeeGent
…
charlie says they're too large to be bees but i've started the hashtag now so it's too late to change it

WILD NATURE "This baby horse is so damn happy, imma have to rt for good luck"

Officials at the WHO also acknowledge the problems of the current system, but say it is so entrenched in consumer behaviour, public policy and industry standards that it would be too expensive and disruptive to make big changes. The experiments that Atwater conducted a century ago, without calculators or computers, have never been repeated even though our understanding of how our bodies work is vastly improved. There is little funding or enthusiasm for such work. As Susan Roberts at Tufts University says, collecting and analysing faeces “is the worst research job in the world”.

In addition, SDOT is implementing signals that give pedestrians at crosswalks a three- to seven-second head start before drivers get a green light to make turns. The system, called leading pedestrian intervals, makes pedestrians in the crosswalk more visible to drivers making turns.
...
In New York City, the transportation department has installed the technology at more than 2,000 intersections since 2014. A 2016 study found that deaths and serious injuries among pedestrians and bicyclists dropped nearly 40 percent at crossings with the systems.

Britain, which acted separately, and slightly before the Pan-European regulator, offered an even more explicit account of its reasoning, explaining that it was grounding the Boeing planes because authorities did not know the cause of the most recent crash, of an Ethiopian Airlines plane on Sunday.

The Federal Aviation Administration, by contrast, said until Wednesday that the absence of information was the reason it was letting domestic airlines keep the planes in the air.

Design Objective

Almost every switch, lever, or handle that a pilot may have to move whilst inflight is shaped differently. Whether it be the external lights, radar controls, or the temperature control for the air conditioning, they are all subtly different. #AvGeek #Aviation

Antti Oulasvirta 👇 VR/AR will never work in practice, no way to solve usability issues, a thread:

Rant: Nine reasons why I don't believe in current VR/AR technology.

HoloLens, Magic Leap, and Oculus: Mind-blowing videos, and the market is estimated to explode to $200 billion by 2025 (Statista). So what's wrong?

HCI research tells why we haven't seen a killer app yet: 1/22

Luke Wroblewski 👇 VR/AR with new input modes and better screens, just a matter of time, a counter-thread:

many of these issues stem from trying to put graphical user interfaces into the real World. Porting windows, icons, menus, keyboards, etc. to 3D space & asking you to point at them will cause many HCI issues. wrong interaction model.

Rather than “git blame” I would like to see “git I did the best I could with the tools and organizational structure available to me so just give me a little space and time and it will get fixed eventually”

Web-end

I almost never animate any property other than transform/opacity. When paired with tasteful usage of will-change, you let the browser skip some of the more expensive rendering steps (paint/layout). (5/9)

You've met the only unclosable HTML tag, right? <plaintext></plaintext> works today (try it in jsbin, jsfiddle, codepen, etc), and refuses to close and it'll baff all the subsequent markup onto the page (including it's own closing tag). Fun times, eh? Straight from the 1990s.

Lines of Code

Andreas Klinger Just this week, I had to figure out which of three similar repositories hold the actual code we use in production:

Job interview: "Solve this recursive graph problem"

Daily work: "Figure out why in this legacy app there are five things named almost the same. And which one to use."

This is it. The end of my career. I've fought this bug for 3 hours and I can't defeat it. The bug defies logic and reason. The rest of my days will be spent in eternal struggle against an amorphous foe, destined to-

Peopleware

In the process of measuring people’s activity, they stumbled upon a fascinating finding: the length of the workday didn’t matter much; what mattered was how people structured their day. In particular, people who were religious about taking short breaks were far more productive than those who worked longer hours.

The ideal work-to-break ratio was 52 minutes of work, followed by 17 minutes of rest.

Amir Salihefendić Key takeaway: "Blocks becomes a non-issue as you are blocked by default"

0/ Remote work isn't exceptional as companies that are spread around multiple offices have done it for the last many years. The special sauce is communicating asynchronously as the default 💡 Here's a thread about why.

Techtopia

That's a lot about profiling for ad targeting, which obviously doesn't work, if anyone would just stop and look at it. But there are way too many people incentivized to believe otherwise. Meanwhile, if you care about your privacy, all that matters is they're still collecting your personal information whether it works or not.

Philly just banned credit- and debit-card only retailers, citing, among other things, economic inequity (not everyone has a card) as well as the privacy implications of requiring all customers to use trackable payments. Interesting policy tradeoff space here.

Startup Life

When getting ready to pitch VCs, founders often jump right into assembling a slide deck.
I think this is a mistake.
I’d suggest that you start by writing twenty headlines that sum up your startup, and only then build the slides.
Here’s why:
1/11

every time i pack for a trip, i somehow convince myself that i will require 3 outfit changes a day like some sort of fashion blogger, only to get there and happily wear the same jeans and tshirt for days in a row???

Hidden deep within the text of her Squaremouth insurance policy was a contest to win $10,000. The company buried instructions for claiming the grand prize in the fine print of every Tin Leg Travel Insurance contract.

"If you've read this far, then you are one of the very few Tin Leg customers to review all of their policy documentation," the fine print read. It included an email address and said the first person who replied would win the prize.

Apart from the charge to engage seriously with this movement — something I haven’t managed to do — the best part of the film is how many times the Flat Earthers disprove their own ideas with elaborate experiments.

Well, that and the amazing T-shirts they all wear.

The Dad "Now THIS is how you spend a snow day with your kid. [Scott Theisen]"

Web-end

Epilepsy Blocker A chrome extension that blocks dangerous, flashing GIFs. For people with photosensitive epilepsy that triggers from exposure to flashing lights at certain intensities or from certain visual patterns.

Lingua Scripta

Johannes Ewald "TIL exporting a function named then can be problematic 😱"

Lines of Code

It is generally true that if you can fool developers into thinking they are "mastering" something hard (as opposed to learning tolerance for something badly designed), you can build a fiercely loyal priesthood.

Architectural

The closer you look, the more wiggles and squiggliness you come across and instead of converging on a more accurate length, the coastline just keeps getting longer. The smaller your ruler, the longer it gets.

Locked Doors

My mom controlled our AOL account when I was about 13 and would come into my room to sign me in. So, I created an entirely fake AOL login flow in Visual Basic and had her sign me in once to capture the password. Old school phishing.

The official Node.js image ships 580 vulnerable system libraries, followed by the others each of which ship at least 30 publicly known vulnerabilities.
...
The current Long Term Support (LTS) version of the Node.js runtime is version 10. The image tagged with 10 (i.e: node:10) is essentially an alias to node:10.14.2- jessie (at the time that we tested it) where jessie specifies an obsolete version of Debian that is no longer actively maintained.

If you had chosen that image as a base image in your Dockerfile, you’d be exposing yourself to 582 vulnerable system libraries bundled with the image

None of the Above

Me: And print.
Printer: No
Me: But why?
Printer: No yellow ink
Me: It’s a black and white document.
Printer: I NEED yellow
Me: You don’t.
Printer:
Me: But —
Printer: I’m not running a fucking charity, get me yellow
Me: Ok but this is the last time.
Printer: lol no

My friend who's a physiotherapist thinks that half the guys on Tinder are using ten-year-old photos, the other half are married, and the other half are single for a reason.
I'd like to tell her that's three halves, but you don't debate math with someone who's rotating your spine

Okay, hear me out.
New business idea: a sleep gym.
No athletic equipment. Only private nap cubbies.
Your friends when they see you hustling off in sweats: “Where ya going?”
You: “The gym. Back in an hour.”
I would seriously join a sleep gym.

Mr Bernanke’s unorthodox “cash for trash” scheme, otherwise known as quantitative easing, drove up asset prices and bailed out baby boomers at the profound political cost of pricing out millennials from that most divisive of asset markets, property. This has left the former comfortable, but the latter with a fragile stake in the society they are supposed to build.

The Verge brings this up as an example of the totalitarian and dehumanizing environment that Facebook moderators experience. But I imagine that if an employee had written down (or used their phone to take a picture of) some personal details of a Facebook user, The Verge (or some identical publication) would have run a report on how Facebook hired contractors who didn’t even take basic precautions to protect user privacy.

I’m not saying nobody should ever be allowed to do investigative reporting or complain about problems. But I would support some kind of anti-irony rule, where you’re not allowed to make extra money writing another outrage-bait article about the outrages your first outrage-bait article caused.

Tools of the Trade

That system found some 60-70 percent of buggy commits, though it also had a false positive rate of 30 percent. Even though this false positive rate is quite high, users of this system nonetheless felt that it was worthwhile, thanks to the time saved when it did correctly identify a bug.

This paper introduces Mesh, a plug-in replacement for malloc that, for the first time, eliminates fragmentation in unmodified C/C++ applications. Mesh combines novel randomized algorithms with widely-supported virtual memory operations to provably reduce fragmentation, breaking the classical Robson bounds with high probability. Mesh generally matches the runtime performance of state-of-the-art memory allocators while reducing memory consumption; in particular, it reduces the memory of consumption of Firefox by 16% and Redis by 39%.

Locked Doors

In the Journal’s testing, Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor, the most popular heart-rate app on Apple’s iOS, made by California-based Azumio Inc., sent a user’s heart rate to Facebook immediately after it was recorded.

Flo Health Inc.’s Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, which claims 25 million active users, told Facebook when a user was having her period or informed the app of an intention to get pregnant, the tests showed.

Real-estate app Realtor.com, owned by Move Inc., a subsidiary of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp , sent the social network the location and price of listings that a user viewed, noting which ones were marked as favorites, the tests showed.

A majority of Americans could be genetically traced by the FBI using consumer genealogy databases and pinpointing a distant family member’s DNA, researchers say, greatly expanding investigators’ ability to identify members of the public suspected of crimes.

Eric Lawrence "Wife wrote a shopping list and entrusted my 5yo to deliver it to me. #infosecmetaphors"

Kevin Roose I can't complain about tech giants harming the social fabric, without pointing out examples of good stewardship. 👇 Thread:

Pinterest has half the staff of Twitter and 1/20th the staff of FB. No war rooms or byzantine enforcement frameworks or faux-democratic governance councils. It just saw people using its platform in a harmful way, and...blacklisted them. Wild!

Flightradar24 — how it works? TIL this real time map of commercial plane traffic is made by hobbiests, and for about $50 you can build your own tracker and contribute to the effort.

Design Objective

When you start designing keeping the B&W color palette constraint in mind, most of your thinking time goes into figuring out how to space things right to be able to seem like things are grouped together. You start thinking about the invisible yet more important aspects such as readability (line height, paragraphs and typography), center of attention (call to action buttons and sizes) and scannability (grouping of elements, spacing)

don’t get clever with login forms Your login forms should be simple, predictable, and play nicely with password managers. That's it. Avoid clever interactions that ends up turning into daily annoyances. For example:

This pattern is incredibly tedious.

Enter email into login form.

Open new tab or switch programs.

Open your inbox.

Find message from service (if you don’t get distracted by other emails first).

Users absolutely hated the new system. Sure, the old system was ugly, but it had everything they needed, right at their fingertips! Their jobs were incredibly fast paced—they worked in a tech support call center and were rated on productivity metrics. They didn’t have time to click or scroll to find information while the clock was literally ticking.

Tools of the Trade

This is a little known React optimization pattern. React rerenders this component deeply when updateX is called, and since children can't have changed, it automatically bails out of trying to update the children. No need for sCU, memo, etc.

ℹ️ Bash tip: if you need to run a quick command in another directory, surround your call in parenthesis. This causes the command to be run in a "subshell" which is discarded after the command runs, keeping your CWD the same.

Example: (cd ~/work/foo ; npm install)

Archmonad of Saturn "Reading up on the PDP-11 minicomputer system and the module control panels are all absolutely gorgeous!"

redactyl.js "Redact sensitive information from JSON for logging (Node.js)" Also, I just love the name of this module.

Architectural

Peopleware

I've had a couple of knee surgeries, and I've never forgotten a nurse who, after I told her how I was feeling, said "So — better than yesterday, and not as good as tomorrow?" If that's true of you learning a new thing, you're on the right track.

No, You Can’t Ignore Email. It’s Rude. In spite of the title, this article makes some good points on setting boudaries and when to not respond to emails. Also, reminds me I've got a few emails to respond to brb …

I have a few general rules. You should not feel obliged to respond to strangers asking you to share their content on social media, introduce them to your more famous colleagues, spend hours advising them on something they’ve created or “jump on a call this afternoon.” If someone you barely know emails you a dozen times a month and is always asking you to do something for him, you can ignore those emails guilt-free.

Yes I am still a maker not a manager and I do not have anyone reporting to me but my new position now requires leadership duties that are best not left implicit or not handled with the same outcomes oriented focus as my past coding assignments. One of the most important competencies of a principal engineer is to become a force multiplier.

Locked Doors

Not only does this portal allow police to view Ring customers on a handy, Google-powered map, but it also makes requesting customer surveillance video a matter of several clicks.
...
“Many people are not going to feel like they have a choice when law enforcement asks for access to their footage,” said Cagle.

When used to simply generate new text, GPT2 is capable of writing plausible passages that match what it is given in both style and subject. It rarely shows any of the quirks that mark out previous AI systems, such as forgetting what it is writing about midway through a paragraph, or mangling the syntax of long sentences.

Roger Ebert was asked why he gave LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT remake 2.5 stars, mainly due to a graphic rape scene, but gave 3.5 to the original, which had a similar scene. "I wrote that original review 37 years ago. I am not the same person. I am uninterested in being 'consistent'."

James Melville "Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to be amazed by the incredible product design magic show."

They’ll run trials with a small number of participants or force extreme circumstances on their subjects. She refers to the findings of a team of researchers from the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, where researchers found that “if you apply evidence-based methods, 40 years of sports drinks research does not seemingly add up to much.”

flex tillerson "'how to survive an ostrich encounter' is the only wikihow article I care about"

Tools of the Trade

I was playing around with some text animations and thought I could use them to show a file's history on @github

Dan Abramov React components are … components. They're not functions, even though they can be written as such. They're not objects, even though they can be written as classes. They're something we're not as good at describing. This is thread makes the point and helps put React hooks in context:

If you look at it this way, there’s nothing magic about useState or useEffect. Of course they “know” which component they belong to! React knows it just like your language knows which variables belong to which function, and when to destroy them.

Locked Doors

Nest makes great points, but I dislike the trend of saying devices being maliciously accessed or abused weren’t ‘hacked’. It’s a weird kind of gatekeeping that kind of discounts the security hygiene and education issues most consumers are still struggling with. Outcome = same.

So every now and then my company sends out phishing emails to us to “test” us. The emails are obvious phishing emails but if you click one you have to sit through a boring hour long training that’s the equivalent of detention. The malicious compliance is I now open no emails from management with headlines that maybe a mundane task or generally something I don’t want to do. Whenever I’m asked why I didn’t respond I simply say I was being careful about phishing and I get praised for it rather than yelled at for dodging work.

Techtopia

Returning to the account of the popular 5th grade teacher who was fired by an algorithm, she suspects that the underlying reason she was fired was that her incoming students had unusually high test scores the previous year (making it seem like their scores had dropped to a more average level after her teaching), and that their former teachers may have cheated.

Jeff Bezos Brings the Receipts In which Jeff Bezos stands up to blackmail, comes across as everyone's favorite underdog, there are nude pictures, and even the Saudi government is involved:

That strategic positioning hasn’t gone without notice. As Kristin Kanthak, a professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, put it on Twitter: “You know we are at a disgusting moment in our nation’s history when the billionaire sending out dick pics is the HERO of the story.”

ginaa wilsonn "So a month ago I dropped a ring & a clip down my bathroom sink and I’ve been scared to try to save it because I was scared it would just drop farther down but look at my cat being the fucking GOAT"

pico-8 Virtual console app for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. Looks like tons of fun!

Mike Rosenberg Journalism has a future, if you care about your subscribers:

The Seattle Times changed course to focus on stories that drive subscriptions - not clicks. Now we're at 41,000 digital subscriptions, up 21% in a year. And no layoffs.
Love working in a community that values independent journalism enough to pay for it